Distributed Multi-Sensor Control for Multi-Target Tracking With a Sparsity-Promoting Objective Function

A distributed multi-sensor control method is presented for multi-target tracking. The problem is formulated as auctioned partially observed Markov decision processes (auctioned POMDPs), which is a tractable approach to approximate the solutions in a distributed manner. To ensure adequate coverage of the multi-sensor system, a sparsity-promoting objective function is also designed to reduce overlapping sensing areas, balancing a tradeoff between the control reward and sensor coverage. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed distributed method achieves comparable tracking performance to the state-of-art centralized approach. Furthermore, the proposed sparsity-promoting objective function outperforms the conventional Cauchy-Schwarz divergence (CSD) in discovery performance.